I assume this is in reference to the rust coreutils being MIT-licensed. How would using GPL benefit them?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Maybe there could be another reason why people choose MIT to begin with:
When you start a new repo on github it makes suggestions which license to use, and I bet many people can't be arsed to think about it and just accept what they're offered. [My memory is a little patchy since I very rarely use github anymore, but I definitely remember something like this.] And maybe github tends to suggest MIT.
That said, please undestand that many, many git platforms exist and there is no reason at all to choose one of the two that actually have the word git in them.
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Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.
Why do they?
They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
How do we explain that?
There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.
Why not?
Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.
How about OpenSSH?
It is MiT licensed. Should somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?
Why haven’t they?
"Commercial" is not the opposite of free/libre. In fact, GPL licensed software can be "taken commercial" with a guarantee that it will remain libre, whereas BSD-licensed software doesn't have those guarantees.
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